'Mad Men' Gets Madder

They called it the boob tube or the idiot box back in the sixties, but with the 21st-century flat screen it’s more like a window than a tube, and it's also not quite as dumb as it used to be. That network hegemony has been replaced by diverse cable fare means the lowest common denominator is no longer a winning formula.

Still, I run into aggressively intelligent people all the time who say “Oh, I don’t watch television,“ and that’s not something you can argue. I wouldn’t bother, their minds are made up. But as positions go it’s not much better than “I don’t read books.“ You’ve got to go where the light is. And with Hollywood firmly in the hands of the Michael Bay school of money changers you’re far more likely to see something interesting on the idiot box than at the so-called cinema. But because there are still networks at work there is something official about TV. It’s the zeitgeist zone, and like fashion it's the totally self-conscious version of the mass unconscious, as the now-quaint Jungians might put it.

Which is a long way of getting around to the meaning of Mad Men, the most hipster-popular series now on television. It has won dozens of Emmy Awards, five Golden Globes, the swanky Peabody Award, and various lauds and accolades from the American Film Institute, the Screen Actor’s Guild, the Writer’s Guild, yadda yadda yadda.

I find it a very interesting development because when I was growing up, Hollywood was in love with Madison Avenue, and portrayed its workings in both comedy and tragedy—but mostly comedy. Madison Avenue was corporate America as it liked to see itself—men in suits behaving as if they were artists and bohemians. The ad man was James Garner, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Jack Lemmon. The ad man was a nine-to-five suit but with the soul of an artist.

When I was ten, my best friend’s dad was the coolest cat in the neighborhood. He worked for B.B.D.&O. and sometimes sat in on drums with Dave Brubeck. His agency was creative, the bohemia of business. The ad man’s woman was Doris Day, Kim Novak, or even Jayne Mansfield. And Madison Avenue was all about Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Hollywood banked on the irresistible myth of creative business.

And now that nobody can even remember how hippies happened, we’re at it again. TV’s contemporary Hamlet is Don Draper, and Mad Men is the cultural artifact that is most reflective of the dilemmas of the current zeitgeist.

As you no doubt know, Don Draper is creative director of a major Madison Avenue “shop.“ He is a cool, slightly ruthless, take-no-prisoners guy, trying to shrug off the enlightenment that bedevils him and deal with the existential dread that haunts his perfect life. His background of abuse and war horrors qualifies him as a potential tragic hero, but Don is not Oedipus. In fact, Don Draper is not even Don Draper—his assumed identity, facilitated by the death of his commanding officer in Korea, is a masterstroke of sleight-of-pen upward mobility. Don is a samurai, innately conversant in the techniques of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, a natural evolution of Castiglione’s Courtier.

Draper despises weakness. His apparent amorality conceals a nostalgia for ethics and a penchant for anonymous good deeds. He despises the grovelers, like account ec Pete Campbell. He despises Roger Sterling, his dissolute nominal boss, for lack of character. The only co-worker Draper seems to admire is Bert Cooper (played flawlessly by the original Mad Man, Robert Morse, a.k.a. J. Pierpont Finch, star of the 1967 hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.) Bert Cooper, a Japanophile with a Rothko in his office, seems to have achieved a sort of corporate satori through a go with the flowchart Zen philosophy. What Cooper seems to know and what Draper is almost desperate to find out is how one can continue to be a human while functioning as a cog in a corporate person. Draper’s solution, so far, is to be an impeccably behaved alpha dog who rips out throats only when necessary, content most of the time to wag his gorgeous tail.

Even Draper’s womanizing is philosophical, a quest that leads him to Greenwich Village, marijuana, and Frank O’Hara. Sometimes he wants to cheat for the sake of cheating, sometimes he’s looking for a woman with greater depth than the picturesque Mrs. Draper (although he may have underestimated her cosmopolitan potential and capacity for transgressive behavior.)

As we left off last week JFK had finally fallen and America was in the middle of a nervous breakdown which just happen to coincide with the breakup of Draper’s marriage, a breakup that seems to spring not from the infidelities of the marriage but from sheer existential dread. Draper, spared death in career, seems misplaced by history. He’s a man of action out of time and forced to cram the instincts of mortal combat into the conventions of the office.

I feel like the plot is about to whirl into the Sylvia Plath poem “Ennui“: “Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard of, while blasé princesses indict tilts at terror as downright absurd.“

Does Don Draper’s appeal have anything to do with the fact that he is utterly doomed and yet he carries on handsomely, playing cleverly in a certain stalemate? His creative challenges are meaningless, yet he pushes on gamely and finds himself adopted by the hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, a dead ringer for John Waters here, who embodies the cliché of the American independent entrepreneurial spirit. Connie is old-school. Don is new school and the twain threatens to diverge.

How will it end as we run out of history a few seasons hence? Will Don achieve satori, drop out, turn on, tune in, and take up Tibetan sand painting in Mill Valley? Or will his Eldorado be driven in despair head-on into a Mack semi? Will the creative director become, at last, an artist?

Somehow Warhol’s idea “business art“ seems to hover over this show. If Andy Warhol is to be believed it can be art. But in Mad Men advertising is clearly not art. It is what men do when they don’t become artists after art school. It’s selling out. It is business that is played, like a violent game. It’s a rat race, but apparently so was evolution.

The appeal of Mad Men is partly in the fashion. The early sixties looks mighty good right now because it reminds us of modernism, a time when people wore clothing, not costumes. Thom Browne has whittled the power suit down to something resembling what the Mad Men wear, slim and silky. We seem to long for a time before the robots rebelled and radiation killed, when progress still seemed possible and the future was still futuristic and going to the moon seemed like a good idea. There was no such thing as distressed clothing. If someone had a tattoo, chances were that they had done time, in stir or brig. It was all so nice, even if it was an illusion. But that’s what TV is for?

The appeal of Mad Men is in its nostalgia for what has disappeared, the roads not taken. It’s about the current yen for a time when pop music was catchy, bars were smokey, and after work the creative directors, tipsy from lunch, might head down to the Village and smoke a stick of tea with a real poet.

I’m as hooked on Mad Men as anyone, but somehow I hope that Betty hires the private detective Peter Gunn to investigate Don's infidelities and winds up living with Pete and singing in the jazz club Mother’s, while Don lands in Maui, growing marijuana with a guy named Dobie Gillis and becoming one of the pioneers of big-wave surfing until one day he's the victim of a triple hold-down and his body is never found.

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